Oswego (WSYR-TV) – It has put Central and Northern New York right into the national spotlight.
Three candidates are slugging it out for the seat vacated by long time Republican Congressman John McHugh in the 23rd Congressional District. With just a week to go, the race for the traditionally Republican seat appears to be tight.
…if the long arm of the IRS will be the agent changing their family’s plan.
Chief Justice John Marshall famously observed that “the power to tax is the power to destroy.” That’s certainly true when it comes to the Senate health care bill, which will use the IRS to change or take away your current health insurance plan.
The most significant tax increase on millions of health insurance plans is the Cadillac excise tax.
If a health insurance plan is offered in a high-cost state and/or provides comprehensive benefits to a usually older work force, the premiums can get pretty high.
Finance Committee Chairman Max Baucus wants to impose a price-control cap on these high-end plans, but couldn’t be that direct about it.
Instead, he used his jurisdictional leverage to propose a 40% excise tax on these plans, to the extent they cost more than $21,000 for a family plan or $8,000 for a single plan.
Lawrence Lessig, one of Obama’s many special tech advisors, on government transparency. If the people see what govt is really like, it will simply drive support for govt even lower. Is that reason enough to not have transparency?http://www.tnr.com/article/books-and-arts/against-transparency?page=0,0“How could anyone be against transparency? Its virtues and its utilities seem so crushingly obvious. But I have increasingly come to worry that there is an error at the core of this unquestioned goodness. We are not thinking critically enough about where and when transparency works, and where and when it may lead to confusion, or to worse. And I fear that the inevitable success of this movement–if pursued alone, without any sensitivity to the full complexity of the idea of perfect openness–will inspire not reform, but disgust. The “naked transparency movement,” as I will call it here, is not going to inspire change. It will simply push any faith in our political system over the cliff.”- Lwrence Lessig
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